Available Light

As a poet/translator/teacher my partner Richard Howard has more books than one can count. Paintings, drawings, and photographs hang in front of the books. Where there is room on a shelf there are eye-catching objets as well. One morning several years ago I suddenly noticed and became intrigued by the rich details of Richard’s apartment revealed in small areas of light cast by the lamps I turned on when getting up early to go to my studio. On impulse I took a few close-up photographs. And then over the next months, more. Here is a small selection of those photographs.

Note: one of the photographs included here is slightly different. On a particularly bright morning a low table piled with books was lit up for a brief moment by sunlight reflected into the apartment off a window across the street. All the others were taken by artificial, but readily available, light.

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David Alexander is a digital artist and photographer living in New York.